Most of the Secretaries of War and Secretaries of the Army have received
brief biographical mention in standard reference works. Principal among these,
insofar as the earlier officials are concerned, is the twenty-volume Dictionary
of American Biography, with supplements, and the thirty-two volume National
Cyclopaedia of American Biography. Eight secretaries are treated in the
four-volume The National Portrait Gallery of Distinguished Americans
(1834–1839). The various editions of Who’s Who in America and Who
Was Who in America contain references to individuals—especially later officials—who
may have had little or no biographical treatment in other sources. Current
Biography is also useful for its coverage of contemporary officials. Treatment
according to editorial perceptions of the relative importance of individuals
is provided in various editions of the Encyclopedia Americana and
Encyclopedia Britannica while officials of military background are also
covered in Francis B. Heitman’s Historical Register andDictionary
of the United States Army (1789–1903), George W. Cullum’s Biographical
Register of the Officers and Graduates of the United States Military Academy,
a work spanning the years 1802–1950 and periodically updated, and Who Was
Who in American History—The Military.

Autobiographies and the secondary literature on the Army’s top civilian
leaders provide the real substance of their lives and service. If the major
published autobiographies and biographies are supplemented by L. D. Ingersoll’s
History of the War Department with its biographical sketches of the first
thirty-three secretaries (including those who served ad interim), and by doctoral
dissertations, most of the gaps in the secretarial bibliography are filled,
however imperfectly. (Doctoral dissertations are normally available in xerographic
or microfilm reproduction from University Microfilms of Ann Arbor, Michigan.)

The bibliographical listing which follows includes works on the Secretaries
of War and the Secretaries of the Army, the predecessors of the Secretary of
War and the officials who served ad interim through the years, and the artists
who painted the secretarial portraits. These are arranged alphabetically by
the individual subject with applicable sources entered alphabetically under
each individual’s name. Since Ingersoll’s History of the War Department
includes biographical information on the first thirty-three secretaries, this
source is not listed under all the individual names, but should be consulted
for information on secretaries who served before 1880. Although full-length
treatment is available on only a few artists, some are covered in such art reference
works as George C. Groce’s and David Wallace’s The New York Historical Society’s
Dictionary of Artists in America andMantleFielding’s
Dictionary of American Painters. Several of the more prominent artists appear
in the standard biographical reference works cited earlier.

Alger, Russell Alexander

Russell Alexander Alger, Late Senator in the Congress of the United States
from Michigan. Lansing: n.p., 1907.

Armstrong, John

Armstrong, John. Notices on the War of 1812. 2 vols. New York: Wiley
and Putnam, 1840.

Skeen, C. Edward. "John Armstrong and the Role of the Secretary of War
in the War of 1812." Ph.D. dissertation, Ohio State University, 1966.

Stille, Charles J. The Life and Service of Joel R. Poinsett. Philadelphia:
Reprinted from the Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 1888.

Porter, Peter Buel

Cozzens, Frederick S. Colonel Peter A. Porter, A Memorial Delivered Before
the Century in December 1864. [Includes a sketch of the life of Col. Porter’s
father, Peter B. Porter.] New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1865.